1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to data compression and decompression and, more specifically, to compression and decompression of low dynamic range pixel data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional compression formats for low dynamic range data for pictures including 3 channels (RGB, i.e., red, green, blue) that are each represented by an 8 bit value, such as the DXT1 compressed texture format used by DirectX8 and its successors, work reasonably well, but generally exhibit visible artifacts when decompressed.
Accordingly, there is a need for a data compression format for these low dynamic range pictures that does not exhibit visible artifacts. Furthermore, it is desirable to be able to decompress the compressed low dynamic range values in hardware in order to process the low dynamic range values as texture data.